A word on my time at Iron Wood working on the AA indie game hit Pacific Drive
Yesterday I was sent a link to a very positive review in GameSpot of a recent game I worked on Pacific Drive. It's become somewhat of an underdog hit of 2024 and since I am mentioned by name I wanted to write about my role in the development of the project.
I joined Ironwood Studios in April of 2020 when Pacific Drive had been in development for about 2 years as Alex Dracott's pet project and recently just been awarded funding. It was a very small team of about 10 people at the time. I was very much on board with the game and especially the atmosphere that Alex had directed us into. One that is of isolation and creepiness with a touch of horror but avoiding outright over-the-top shock and gore. This was something along the lines of the Netflix series Dark, a show of which I am a big fan.
Although I have an extensive background in horror and dark ambient sound design and music - both with my abstract industrial project Xiphoid Dementia and with extensive sound design, music, and ambience created for crypts, dungeons, and cemeteries in Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons online - I think I was actually hired for my vehicle sound design skills that I had garnered while at Wargaming.
So it was that the first thing I really sunk my teeth into on Pacific Drive was the recording of the vehicle. It was Alex's original station wagon that we took out to Carnation, WA and rigged up with a myriad of microphones placed strategically to get a good variety of loops that I could blend together as the vehicle is manipulated by the players. The chug of the muffler kicks in as you lurch forward and builds as you go faster and with when you let off the gas you feel the muffler give way to the engine vent so it's like the car is a living breathing entity with which you are interacting with. These sounds were probably about my first 3-4 months of work on the project and the final product is not too far off from where I left it.
Since the game was still in the early phases I think at least half of my work - most of which was a "first pass" level - didn't make it into the final product. I did initial passes on resource tools, anomalies, and car foley. However, the "siren-like" ambient sod sounds were just another "quick fix" at the time I implemented them. Something to spice up the ambience at the time. These were screeching, scraped, and manipulated scrap metal that I pulled from my personal archive of sound effects. A field recording I had made while urban exploring with my best friend in abandon factories in Monessan, PA while he was attending Tom Savini's school of practical special fx. Here are some photos from that very trip:
I like to say that my "first pass" of sound design generally falls at a quality level of being about 80% to shippable quality. Of course there is some give and take. Sometimes it's a bit off and sometimes I hit the mark right away and the rest is history. Apparently that was one of those times!
After I left Ironwood didn't hire another in-house audio person but instead chose to outsource their audio work to A Shell In The Pit who took the reins. I still say Pacific Drive is one of the coolest games I ever worked on and I do wish that I could have stayed at Ironwood to see the project through but the universe had other plans for me!
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